Nixon and Mao (36 page)

The United States found, as great powers frequently do, that its client would not listen when it urged him to concentrate on building up Taiwan and to leave the Communist regime on the mainland to its fate. In the late 1950s, Dulles and American diplomats were seriously concerned by Chiang’s nonchalance about the prospect of using nuclear weapons; they would have been even more worried if they had known that Chiang had guessed, rightly, that the United States could not afford to abandon him once it had made its commitment in the early 1950s.
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Any American government that had done so would have faced a huge uproar at home and run the risk internationally of showing weakness in the face of the Communist threat. As a result, the United States repeatedly faced crises over Taiwan that threatened to drag it into a major war with China and, at least until the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, with the Soviet Union itself.

Just off the coast of China, a string of little islands, some of them no more than large rocks, that Guomindang troops had seized and fortified were, like Berlin in Europe, particular flashpoints. On the south end, Quemoy was at the entrance to the important port of Xiamen (Amoy). (For the People’s Republic, as one American diplomat said, it was like having Manhattan held by an enemy force.)
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At the north, Matsu sat a few miles off another major port, Fuzhou. From time to time, tensions would flare up, either because of Guomindang activities or because of Communist attacks, in the form of either commando raids or shelling from their shore batteries.

The worst crisis came in August 1958, when Mao suddenly decided on a serious and sustained bombardment, possibly because the Americans were preoccupied with a crisis in the Middle East but more likely because he needed something to rally the Chinese people as the Great Leap Forward lurched into its most radical phase. In two rousing and widely publicized speeches to the Supreme State Council, he called on the Chinese people and the peoples of the world to resist American imperialism.
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The Eisenhower administration felt itself obliged to respond. Although its treaty with Taiwan did not include protecting the islands, Congress had subsequently passed a resolution authorizing the president to use armed force in their defense. Eisenhower sent a huge flotilla to reinforce American naval forces in the Taiwan Strait, and American warships started escorting the vessels from Taiwan resupplying the beleaguered island garrisons. The supplies included American guns capable of firing nuclear warheads. “Such a few shots,” said Mao. “I did not expect the world to get so stirred up over it.” The possibility of a major war between the United States and the People’s Republic of China was very real during those tense weeks of late August and September. The Soviet Union, which privately was dismayed at Mao’s belligerence and apparent willingness to risk even nuclear war, issued a public warning that it could not stand by if its ally was attacked. Chiang Kai-shek urged the Americans to take a strong stand and threatened to send his own planes in to bomb the Communists’ shore batteries.
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Fortunately, the Americans had no intention of being drawn into a major war by Chiang or by Mao. American naval vessels were careful to stand well away from the islands, out of range of Communist shells. Dulles told a press conference that the question of the Guomindang returning to the mainland was “highly hypothetical,” and he and Chiang issued a joint statement that had been carefully crafted in Washington to the effect that the United States supported the Guomindang’s desire to restore freedom to the mainland but that this would be done mainly through political means. Mao, for all his talk about not fearing a nuclear war, was similarly cautious, sending impossible orders to his local commanders to dispatch their shells so that they hit only Guomindang military and ships and not American. The American and Chinese representatives in Warsaw resumed their talks, and the shelling from the mainland petered out. Both sides claimed victory. The United States, though, had made it clear that it did not want Taiwan to precipitate it into a war with the People’s Republic. Mao later boasted to Edgar Snow that he had forced the Americans to send in their troops, and then, by ending the shelling, left them with nothing to do: “Therefore the American troops are subject to transfer at our mere beckoning, a bit like Chiang Kai-shek’s troops.” Behind the scenes, the Soviet and Chinese Communists had taken another big step toward their eventual split.
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After 1958, the Communists did not try seriously to retake the islands. They contented themselves with bombarding their garrisons with loud propaganda and issuing “serious” warnings, about a thousand over the years, to the United States about its naval vessels coming too close to the Chinese shoreline. When Nixon visited China the warnings suddenly stopped. Mao claimed it suited the Chinese Communists to leave the islands in Guomindang hands: “We will let them hang there, neither dead nor alive, using them as a means to deal with the Americans.”
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And the islands kept open a possible link to the Guomindang and Taiwan. If Chiang were to abandon them, the gap between the mainland and Taiwan would suddenly lengthen physically, from a few to a hundred miles, and perhaps in thought as well.
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When he talked to Nixon in February 1972, Chou claimed that the Communists had let Chiang know this: “We advised him not to withdraw by firing artillery shells at them—that is, on odd days we would shell them, and not shell them on even days, and on holidays we would not shell them. So they understood our intentions and didn’t withdraw.”
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The Chinese Communists, with their insistence that Taiwan was and always had been part of China, did not want to encourage any thought that there might be a China on the mainland and a separate state out in the Pacific called Taiwan or simply two Chinas. For years the People’s Republic had refused to join organizations where Taiwan was represented or to have full diplomatic relations with any country that recognized the government of what the Guomindang insisted was the Republic of China.

The Communists also watched Taiwan apprehensively for signs of an independence movement, something that was not unlikely given Taiwan’s history and the fact that many of its inhabitants had no ties to the mainland. In his talks with Kissinger and then with Nixon, Chou demanded that the Americans promise not to support the independence movement in Taiwan. In his meeting with Nixon on February 24 he noted, with some asperity, that Professor Peng Mengmin, a leading figure in the movement, had received some support in the United States and had fled from Taiwan with American help. (By coincidence, Peng had once been a student of Kissinger’s.) Chiang Kai-shek, Chou added approvingly, knew how to deal with talk of independence; he would suppress any such movement in Taiwan. Nixon and Kissinger did their best to reassure Chou. “I told the Prime Minister,” Kissinger said, “that no American personnel, directly or indirectly, nor any American agency, directly or indirectly, will give any encouragement or support in any way to the Taiwan Independence Movement.” If Chou had any information, Kissinger asked, he should send it on through their secret channel and the Americans would take action against the movement. “I endorse that commitment at this meeting today,” Nixon added.
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It was perhaps a curious position for the leader of a nation that had done so much in the past to support national self-determination, but Nixon was determined that Taiwan should not stand in the way of his rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. When they had first contemplated their opening, Nixon and Kissinger had prepared to abandon Taiwan, slowly, quietly, and, if they could, without enraging the right. Kissinger, as someone who was primarily interested in Europe, had never taken much interest in it. As he told Chou the first time they met, he had never been there. Nixon, by contrast, knew Taiwan well. In his heyday as an anti-Communist he had been one of its prominent supporters. In the 1950s he had been all for allowing Chiang to attack the mainland, and he’d apparently shared Chiang’s faith that the Communist regime would crumble. By the 1960s, however, when he had time to travel and reflect, he was reconsidering many of his former views. “Chiang was a friend,” he told an interviewer much later, “and unquestionably one of the giants of the twentieth century. I wondered whether he might be right, but my pragmatic analysis told me he was wrong.”
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Nevertheless, in his first years as president, even while he was re-thinking his China policy, Nixon continued to reassure Chiang of his support. “I will never sell you down the river,” he told Chiang’s son in the spring of 1970.
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As the secret channel to Beijing began to produce results, Nixon had to face doing just that. In April 1971, as they waited anxiously for Chou’s reply to one of Nixon’s messages, Nixon told Kissinger, “Well, Henry, the thing is the story change is going to take place, it has to take place, it better take place when they got a friend here rather than when they’ve got an enemy here.” Kissinger agreed: “No, it’s a tragedy that it has to happen to Chiang at the end of his life, but we have to be cold about it.” In the end, said Nixon, “We have to do what’s best for us.” As Kissinger prepared to leave for his secret trip to China, Nixon gave him some last instructions: “he wished him not to indicate a willingness to abandon much of our support for Taiwan until it was necessary to do so.”
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In his briefing notes for that first trip, Kissinger indicated that he expected the Chinese to want some agreement on reducing American forces in Taiwan and in the strait (although he found it encouraging that they used the word “eventually” when they talked of the prospect). He thought, though, that the Chinese might well be prepared to accept a continuation of the existing political relationship between the United States and Taiwan. In the account of his meetings with Chou that he wrote for Nixon, he noted the Chinese “preoccupation” with Taiwan, but he may not have taken it all that seriously. Certainly in his memoirs he gives the impression that Taiwan came up only briefly during that first visit.
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That is not what the record of the talks shows and not how the Chinese viewed them. Huang Hua, who was present, told the Canadian foreign minister shortly afterward that they had focused almost entirely on Taiwan.
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While this was an exaggeration, Kissinger and Chou spent much of their time on the subject. The Chinese, from the first tentative contacts, hoped to make their recovery of Taiwan a precondition for any improvement of relations between the United States and China. Taiwan came at the top of the list of the instructions to Chou worked out by the Politburo and approved by Mao before Kissinger’s secret trip: “All U.S. armed forces and military installations should be withdrawn from Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait in a given period. This is the key to restoring relations between China and the United States. If no agreement can be reached on this principle in advance, it is possible that Nixon’s visit would be deferred.”
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In the very first message Chou sent to Nixon, in December 1970 through the Pakistan government, he said, “In order to discuss the subject of the vacation of Chinese territories called Taiwan, a special envoy of President Nixon’s will be most welcome in Peking.” The Americans did not want, and indeed could not allow, that their withdrawing of support from Taiwan be a precondition to either Kissinger’s visit or Nixon’s or that the agenda for their discussions with the Chinese be confined to that one subject. In his replies to Chou, Nixon insisted on a broad agenda, one that would deal with all of the important issues between their two countries. The Chinese accepted this. Taiwan remained at the top of their list, but they focused on getting American troops out rather than their end goal of reuniting the island with China. Nixon did not make a concrete commitment on the withdrawal from Taiwan but pointed out that as tensions in Asia diminished, the United States would be cutting back on the forces it had there. Both sides had enough at stake in improved relations that they were prepared to compromise. Both had to do so, however, in a way that did not look as though they were showing weakness.
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During Kissinger’s two trips in 1971, he worked out the basis for an agreement on Taiwan.
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He has since been criticized for too readily abandoning an old American ally and for exceeding his instructions by promising more than he should have. Yet the Chinese Communists had made it amply clear that without American concessions on Taiwan, they were not prepared to move forward to put Sino-American relations on a more normal footing. Moreover, as Chou, a master at diplomacy himself, well knew, negotiations proceed by a combination of clear statements, hints, and suggestions. Kissinger, when it was necessary, gave firm commitments to the Chinese, but he also hinted at more to come once Nixon had been reelected as president in the fall of1972. The United States, he said categorically, did not support the idea of two Chinas or of a mainland China and a Taiwan. The United States accepted the Chinese claim that Taiwan was a part of China, although here he expressed himself cautiously, saying that the United States would like to see a solution of the issue “within the framework of one China.” As he said to Chou, “There’s no possibility in the next one and a half years for us to recognize the PRC as the sole government of China in a formal way.” Once Nixon had made a successful visit to China, Kissinger promised, and once he had been reelected for a second term, the United States would be able to move ahead rapidly to establish full and normal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. “Other political leaders,” he told Chou in what was a familiar theme, “might use more honeyed words, but would be destroyed by what is called the China lobby in the U.S. if they ever tried to move even partially in the direction which I have described to you.”
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Kissinger also indicated that the United States was going to end its support for Chiang Kai-shek, although he was vague about the fate of the United States’ defense treaty with Taiwan. The Americans, Kissinger said, realized that China did not recognize the legitimacy of the treaty, adding that “maybe history can take care of events.” (History did not take care of it, and the continued existence of the treaty was going to cause considerable trouble with the People’s Republic later on.) The United States, Kissinger also promised, would not support any attempt by the Taiwanese to become independent. The Chinese Communists, who did not fully understand how a democracy worked, were puzzled and disturbed by apparent American contradictions—when, for example, Senator Jacob Javits called, just after Kissinger’s October 1971 visit, for a plebiscite where the people of Taiwan might express their views. “This rabid nonsense,” said the Xinhua news agency, “fully demonstrates that even after its defeat in the General Assembly, US imperialism is still pushing the scheme to create ‘one China, one Taiwan.’” When Chou expressed repeated fears about Japanese expansionism, Kissinger reassured him that the United States would oppose any Japanese military presence on Taiwan. (In their darker moments, the Chinese worried, or said they did, that Japan was plotting with leaders of the Taiwanese independence movement.) On the other hand, Kissinger promised, once the United States had found a way to make peace in Vietnam, it would set a firm timetable to remove the two-thirds of its forces in Taiwan that were there only because of the war. The remaining American forces would be removed as relations between the United States and China improved.
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